ABOUT MEN

ABOUT MEN; Christmas In the Making

BY JIM STASNY: Jim Stasny is a writer who lives in Arlington, Va.

Published: December 25, 1988

AROUND HALLOWEEN, about the time the leaves burned at the curbside, my father set the clock ticking toward Christmas. Time changed, the temperature dropped and a pause settled on his workshop. From the basement, tobacco smoke curled up the stairs, bringing with it the sounds of pages turning in his old carpenters' magazines.

He was gathering patterns to bring his fancy to life. When he found what stirred him, he began tugging Christmas out of the lumber stacked against the back wall of the basement. He knew how to take what a tree gave him and give it a second life. He even knew how to take apart the second life, and out of its remnants create something entirely new. That's how my father made Christmas.

When he was born, our town was in its heyday, and banks and families of wealth had pieces built with walnut and maple. Decades later, the 1950's brought spidery, blond decor into fashion. People called my father to remodel their spaces, and unwittingly paid him twice - once to tear out the old and put in the new, and again when they let him take what he tore out. He brought it home, and out of drugstore counters, conference tables and bank doors, he made heirlooms in a basement workshop rich and full of mystery.

In a dim corner stood his drill press, the one that could drill square holes. Beneath the stairs and along the walls sat strongboxes full of tools. Undisturbed on the shelves were little yellow cartons filled with parts for machines made when the century was still very new. He owned a belt sander, a two-fisted vibrating machine that could force the blood in the arms back up to the shoulder blades. Now and then, he'd let me handle even his matched set of ratchet screwdrivers, the oiled, clicking devices I'd still like to steal.

The sounds that followed became a kind of calendar. By listening carefully during the first week of November, I could hear the pencils scratch. He was sketching, making notes, trying out figures. Two weeks into the month came the sounds of the rule, which meant he was measuring the wood. Except when he went to church on Sundays, my father always carried the rule stuffed along with his handkerchief in his back pocket. Extended, the rule stretched to 60 inches of black fractions and red whole numbers. Collapsed, it became 10 parallel sticks, snapped shut on metal hinges.

As the week before Thanksgiving came on, he began to cut the wood. High-pitched stuttering meant the jigsaw, and Christmas was coming in fine-cut mirror frames or butterflies. If the sound was of dynamos - if the pitch was a scream and the wood fought back - he had unleashed the table saw, and hammer and nails were sure to follow.

A table saw is a thick metal surface with a slot in the middle. The slot houses a motor-driven disk with steel fangs around its circumference. The machine is loud and dangerous, and its by-product is a gush of sawdust blowing out a chute beneath the front end. Below the mouth of the chute, my father put a cardboard cylinder about the size of a trash can that once served as a toy basket. The screaming herbivore of a table saw blew dust into a bin still decorated with cows jumping over moons and little boys wearing pajamas and carrying candles.

Regardless of the time or number of parts involved, my father always minimized his talent with a word all his own - ''dis-ear.'' I never found the word in dictionaries, but I was afraid to ask how it was spelled for fear he'd find out I didn't know what it meant and conclude I was falling behind in school.

Then one night while deep in his work, he muttered out loud: ''Now, where the hell is that dis-ear?'' followed by a grunt of discovery when he picked up a chisel. A chisel. A ''dis-ear'' is a chisel! I had my prize - briefly. A week or so later, while I sat on the basement steps and watched him, he said the same thing - then picked up his watch.

I fit these experiences into a shaggy conclusion. ''Dis-ear'' was his way of saying ''Whadayacallit'' or ''thing'' or ''this here,'' which long ago may have been what his own father said to capture a missing, temporarily nameless object.

Language aside, the first week of December meant Christmas was closing in, and in a year I remember with special fondness, it was coming in a spice box and coming fast.

By itself, the little box was a thing of basic grace. With six small drawers, it was perfect for the kitchen or sewing room. But it was made from 49 different pieces of wood in eight different sizes. It involved beveling the front piece of every drawer, sculpturing the back and sides of the box itself with the jigsaw, cutting 12 joints to fit it together, applying glue, driving 40 nails, and staining the final product.

It took all that work to make the fine little ''dis-ear.'' But my father wasn't making just one. He was making two dozen - with 1,200 pieces, nearly a thousand nails. The days until Christmas - oozing by for me - were sprinting by for him. And because he was a regular employee of the Standard Oil Company during the day, there were only nights and weekends to get it all done.

Little motors driving tiny blades channeled out miniature joints. Just 48 hours till Christmas, the intoxicants of stain, turpentine and varnish rose from the basement to mix with the scent of the tree and the smell of cookies baking.

When Christmas Eve came and the whole family of aunts, uncles and cousins swept into my grandmother's house, the smells of wood and fine oils were the giveaways that my father had done it again. The boxes were still too damp to wrap. But when he handed them out at the end of the night, the hands of the family glided across the wood boxes. Christmas lights reflected on them in blue and yellow smudges, true gifts, finely made, honestly admired.

Across the years, the boxes took their place with those he made for other Christmases. Miniature dry sinks one year, dwarf cobblers' benches another, carved footstools, hand-tooled blunderbusses, letter racks and key boxes. Every Christmas, a craftsman's gift for each household in the large family. And -created in the hours after midnight throughout December - always something unique.

In my office today sits a felt-lined display case with a glass lid and a drawer underneath, the gift he gave me to hold the book of tributes a year after President John F. Kennedy's death. Still at my parents' home is a writing desk he made with a tilt top and drawers that pull out from the sides. And something else. For all the years of my childhood, an odd and faded piece of wood hung from a lumber rack attached to the joists in the basement. It resembled an inverted mustache, always watching me as I sat and watched my father from the basement steps.

Before I left for my second year of college, he took it down, along with a stand I'd never noticed. Fitted together, they made an oxbow lamp, one of the very first things he had made out of wood as a youngster. He fixed it up, gave it to me that Christmas. It lights my page now, as it has lighted all my pages for more than 20 years.